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Home » July 31st, 2011
Entries posted on “July, 2011”
LOS ANGELES (AP & staff) — Little blue Smurfs and not-so-little green men from space are in a photo finish for the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford’s sci-fi Western “Cowboys & Aliens” and the family adventure “The Smurfs” both opened with $36.2 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. That leaves Sony’s “Smurfs” and Universal’s “Cowboys & Aliens” tied for the top spot. Figuring out the No. 1 movie will have to wait until final numbers are counted Monday. “In all my years, I’ve never really seen a race this close,” said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst for box-office tracker Hollywood.com. “Generally, in the world of movie box office, $1 million is a close call, so to have two films in a dollar-to-dollar tie is somewhat unprecedented.” Studios often round off their Sunday numbers, which include Friday and Saturday totals plus an estimate of Sunday business based on how similar movies have done in the past. So Sunday figures typically are rounded off to the nearest $50,000 or $100,000, with more accurate, to-the-dollar numbers generally coming in Monday’s final tally. But Universal released an estimate of $36,206,250, which would have put “Cowboys & Aliens” a fraction ahead of “The Smurfs” in Sunday’s rankings. So Sony, which had reported a rounded-off figure of $36.2 million, matched that $36,206,250 estimate for “The Smurfs.” “We’re going with that extra $6,250, because it’s just too close to call,” said Rory Bruer, head of distribution at Sony. “It just seems like the most fair thing to do is call it a tie and let Monday sort it out.” Studios jockey for the top box-office spot to earn “No. 1 film in America” bragging rights in advertising for the coming week. Going into the weekend, “Cowboys & Aliens” seemed to have the edge, with analysts figuring it might top $40 million, while “The Smurfs” might come in around $30 million. But the two movies met in the middle, “Cowboys & Aliens” doing worse than expected and “The Smurfs” doing better. “This is truly a photo finish,” said Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal. “Nobody can call it. The truth of the matter is, it’s a tie, and with two totally different kinds of films.” “Cowboys & Aliens” stars Craig as an amnesiac wanderer who teams with cattle baron Ford to take on hulking aliens that invade a town in [...]
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NEW YORK (AP & staff) — The Kings of Leon are promising a redo for their Dallas fans after canceling a show because their lead singer complained it was too hot to perform, leading other members to profusely apologize to the audience. In a statement, the family rock band, known for hits including the Grammy Award-winning anthem “Use Somebody,” announced plans to return to Dallas on Sept. 21 to make up for Friday’s mid-show cancellation, which drummer Nathan Followill called a “fiasco” on Twitter. “The Kings of Leon apologize to their fans for the inconvenience this may have caused and look forward to seeing their fans again in September,” read a statement sent by their publicist on Sunday. On Friday, lead singer Caleb Followill repeatedly complained that it was too hot and that his voice was suffering because of it. “My voice is completely 100 percent gone,” he said. After a few more songs, he announced to the audience: “I’m gonna go back stage for a second, I’m gonna vomit, I’m gonna drink a beer and I’m gonna come back out and play three more songs.” He never did come back out, leaving the rest of the band to announce the abrupt end of the show to a booing audience. The other members, including guitarist Matthew Followill and bassist Jared Followill, were apologetic and later took to Twitter to let out their frustrations. “Not so good morning 4 me today,” Nathan Followill tweeted. “Ashamed & embarrassed by last night’s fiasco. Can’t apologize enough, utterly gutted. A million I’m sorrys.” Jared Followill tweeted: “Dallas, I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am. There are internal sicknesses & problems that have needed to be addressed. No words.” He added: “I love our fans so much. I know you guys aren’t stupid. There are problems in our band bigger than not drinking enough Gatorade.” However, the statement released by the band did not address other troubles, and it said Caleb “suffered from heat exhaustion and dehydration … causing his vocal chords to seize.” The Nashville-based band also canceled Saturday’s show in Houston. That show was rescheduled for Sept. 22.
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OSLO, Norway (AP & Staff) — It’s unlikely that the right-wing extremist who admitted killing dozens in Norway last week will be declared legally insane because he appears to have been in control of his actions, the head of the panel that will review his psychiatric evaluation told. The decision on Anders Behring Breivik’s mental state will determine whether he can be held criminally liable and punished with a prison sentence or sent to a psychiatric ward for treatment. The July 22 attacks were so carefully planned and executed that it would be difficult to argue they were the work of a delusional madman, said Dr. Tarjei Rygnestad, who heads the Norwegian Board of Forensic Medicine. In Norway, an insanity defense requires that a defendant be in a state of psychosis while committing the crime with which he or she is charged. That means the defendant has lost contact with reality to the point that he’s no longer in control of his own actions. “It’s not very likely he was psychotic,” Rygnestad told the AP. The forensic board must review and approve the examination by two court-appointed psychiatrists before the report goes to the judge hearing the case. The judge will then decide whether Breivik can be held criminally liable. Rygnestad told a psychotic person can only perform simple tasks. Even driving from downtown Oslo to the lake northwest of the capital, where Breivik opened fire at a political youth camp, would be too complicated. “If you have voices in your head telling you to do this and that, it will disturb everything, and driving a car is very complex,” Rygnestad said. “How he prepared” for the rampage — meticulously acquiring the materials and skills he needed to carry out his attack while maintaining silence to avoid detection — argues against psychosis, Rygnestad added. By his own account, the 32-year-old Norwegian spent years plotting the attack. On July 22, he set off a car bomb that killed eight people in downtown Oslo’s government district, then drove north to a youth camp on Utoya, a small lake island set amid a quiet countryside of pines and spruces. There, he spent 90 minutes executing 69 people, mostly teenage members of the youth wing of Norway’s governing Labor Party. In a 1,500-page manifesto released just before the attacks, Breivik describes his two-pronged attack as the opening salvos of a new crusade that, by [...]
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LOS ANGELES (AP & staff) — Harry Potter has joined the billion-dollar club. Distributor Warner Bros. said Sunday that “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2″ crossed the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. It’s soon expected to pass “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” which is this year’s top grossing movie at $1.03 billion. The last of the eight films about the young wizard is the first in the franchise to reach the billion dollar mark. The previous best global haul was $974.8 million for the original film, 2001′s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” With $21.9 million domestically this weekend, “Deathly Hallows: Part 2″ climbed to a domestic total of $318.5 million. That tops the franchise’s previous best of $317.6 million for “Sorcerer’s Stone.” But factoring in today’s higher admission prices, “Deathly Hallows: Part 2″ has not caught up to “Sorcerer’s Stone” in terms of actual tickets sold. The 2009 film “Avatar” holds the record for the biggest worldwide box office haul, grossing $2.8 billion. It’s followed by another James Cameron film, “Titanic,” which brought in $1.8 billion.
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RICHMOND, Calif. (AP & Staff) — Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word. Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published. “There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.” So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse itself is large enough to hold about 1 million titles, each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container in which it resides. That’s far fewer than the more than the nearly 130 million different books Google engineers involved in that company’s book scanning project estimate to exist worldwide. But Kahle says the ease with which they’ve acquired the first half-million donated texts makes him optimistic about reaching what he sees as a realistic goal of 10 million, the equivalent of a major university library. “The idea is to be able to collect one copy of every book ever published. We’re not going to get there, but that’s our goal,” he said. Recently, workers in offices above the warehouse floor unpacked boxes of books and entered information on each title into a database. The books ranged from “Moby Dick” and “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” to “The Complete Basic Book of Home Decorating” and “Costa Rica for Dummies.” At this early stage in the book collection process, specific titles aren’t being sought out so much as large collections. Duplicate copies of books already in the archive are re-donated elsewhere. If someone does need to see an actual physical copy of a book, Kahle said it should take no more than an hour to fetch it from its dark, dry home. “The dedicated idea is to have the physical safety for these physical materials for the long haul and then have the digital versions accessible to the world,” Kahle said. Along with keeping books [...]
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SALT LAKE CITY (AP & staff) — A diplomat to the core, Jon Huntsman is well known here as a likable guy who prefers compromise to combativeness. Niceness is such a strong part of his persona that the Republican pledged to run a civil campaign for president. “He genuinely wants to please people, and he gets along with everyone,” says Olene Walker, a Republican who preceded Huntsman as Utah governor. But now, as Huntsman struggles against better-known opponents, he is both subtly and directly criticizing GOP front-runner Mitt Romney as well as the Democrat who named him U.S. ambassador to China just a few years ago, President Barack Obama. The shift in tone comes as polls show Huntsman in single digits nationally and in key states, and it follows his decision to change campaign managers. Advisers over the past few weeks have been telling Huntsman that he must engage Romney and Obama to boost his prospects of winning the GOP nomination. He’s obliged. While in South Carolina recently, Huntsman jabbed at Romney’s record, saying Utah led the way on job creation and urging his audience to compare it to Massachusetts’ standing: “Not first, but 47th.” And last week in New Hampshire, he called Obama “a good man” and “earnest.” But, he added, “He’s fundamentally failed us.” It’s an uncomfortable political role for Huntsman, who has prided himself on his diplomatic skills and is rarely disliked by anyone, even those who disagree with him politically. In part, that’s because he has never faced a strong challenge for political office, but it also speaks to his personality. Republicans and Democrats alike in Utah roundly describe Huntsman as a leader who always sought the middle ground and never resorted to personal attacks to gain the upper hand. “He wasn’t an ideologue, and he empathized with a lot of different points of views,” said Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker, who was the Utah House minority leader during most of Huntsman time as governor. “He’s the kind of leader we want. He’s inclusive, he’s charming and he’s got strong diplomatic skills.” As governor, Huntsman was almost as popular with Democrats as he was with those in his own party, which made him practically invincible when he ran for re-election in 2008 in a strongly conservative state. His Democratic opponent, Bob Springmeyer, said Huntsman never did anything publicly or privately that suggested he was anything [...]
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WASHINGTON (AP & staff) — President Barack Obama is stepping up his criticism of Syria’s crackdown on protesters, charging that the Syrian president is “completely incapable and unwilling” to respond to what Obama calls the legitimate grievances of the Syrian people. Dozens of people were reported killed Sunday as Syrian security forces escalated their response to protests against President Bashar Assad. In the city of Hama, a barrage of shelling and gunfire left bodies scattered in the streets. Obama issued a statement Sunday saying he is “appalled” by the violence and brutality the Syrian government has aimed at its own people. He calls the reports from Hama “horrifying” and says they demonstrate the true character of the Syrian regime. Obama says the U.S. will continue to increase pressure on the Syrian regime.
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WASHINGTON (AP & staff) — Dear voter: Want to know why Democrats and Republicans in Congress find it so hard to work together to solve tough problems like the debt ceiling, health care and Social Security? Look in the mirror. Americans gripe about cowardly, self-serving politicians, and Congress doubtlessly has its feckless moments and members. But voters are quick to overlook their own role in legislative impasses that keep the nation from resolving big, obvious, festering problems such as immigration, the long-term stability of Medicare, and now, the debt ceiling. Here’s the truth: The overwhelming majority of senators and House members do what their constituents want them to do. Or, more to the point, they respond to people in their districts who bother to vote. Nothing is dearer to politicians than re-election, and most have a keen sense of when they are straying into dangerous waters. For a growing number of senators and representatives, the only risk is in their party’s primary, not in the general election. Most voters, and many news outlets, ignore primaries. That gives control to a relative handful of motivated, hard-core liberals (in Democratic contests) and full-bore conservatives (in GOP primaries). In politically balanced districts, a hard-right or hard-left nominee may have trouble in the general election, when many independent and centrist voters turn out. But many House districts today aren’t balanced, thanks largely to legislative gerrymandering and Americans’ inclination to live and work near people who share their views and values. The result is districts so solidly conservative that no GOP nominee can possibly lose, or so firmly liberal that any Democratic nominee is certain to win. In these districts, the primary is the whole ball game. Republican lawmakers are under constant pressure to drift to the right, to make sure no fire-breathing conservative outflanks them in a light-turnout primary dominated by ideologues. The same goes for Democrats on the left. So who turns up on Capitol Hill for freshman orientation? Democrats and Republicans who can barely comprehend each other’s political viewpoints, let alone embrace them enough to pursue a possible compromise on big issues. But what if a Republican and Democrat do decide to meet halfway in hopes of finding, say, a path to shore up Social Security for decades to come. What can they expect? In some states and districts, they can expect to be drummed out of their party for the crime [...]
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WASHINGTON (AP & staff) — Not too long ago there was lofty talk of doing something big. Of a reasonable path. Of a grand bargain. That was a few weeks and a few thousand tortured metaphors ago. The debate over raising the federal debt limit has triggered a spiral of rhetorical one-upmanship that has all sides stretching for new analogies and catchy one-liners to sway public opinion. Stretching far enough to pull a few muscles. It was one thing when the president spoke of his desire for a “big” deal. And quite another when press secretary Jay Carney explained that “reasonableness and bigness walk down the street hand in hand.” There’s been ominous talk of driving off a cliff, collateral damage, loaded guns, hostage situations, the dark cloud of uncertainty and the fog of the Twilight Zone. There have been catchy catchphrases like “cut, cap and balance,” later derided as “duck, dodge and dismantle.” Whole genres of metaphorical warfare have sprung up, producing some hits, more misses. FOOD FIGHT “We might as well do it now,” President Barack Obama admonished a few weeks back, urging Congress to buckle down to the unpleasant task of raising the debt limit. “Pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas.” It was an apt metaphor, one that tea party activists were happy to plop in a spoon and fling right back at the White House. “Eat your own peas!” read a tea party sign at a rally on Capitol Hill. House Speaker John Boehner made his own culinary contribution to the debate when he complained that negotiating with the White House was like “dealing with Jell-O.” The Republican National Committee liked that so much it gave the president a new title: “His Jello-Ness.” AT THE MOVIES Everyone likes a good film, so it’s no surprise that politicians are trying to create a little movie magic of their own. House Democrats complained that the repetitive debt debate was starting to feel like “Groundhog Day.” Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., accused Republicans of taking the country into “The Twilight Zone.” House Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy tried to rally GOP support by playing lawmakers a clip of the bank-robber film “The Town,” in which Ben Affleck tells an ally: “I need your help. … We’re gonna hurt some people.” Carney countered with a cringe-worthy film analogy of his own, harking back to the 1982 movie “Sophie’s Choice,” in which [...]
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WASHINGTON (AP & staff) — The U.S. Senate plunged on Sunday into what many lawmakers and the White House — and millions of Americans coast to coast — hoped would be an all-but-decisive last-minute effort to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and defuse a crisis that still could lead to an unprecedented government default. As senators began debate in a rare Sunday session — just hours after Saturday night’s concluded — Democratic leader Harry Reid said he was “cautiously optimistic” agreement could be reached. But first, in a partisan vote, the Senate rejected an effort to advance a Democratic approach to resolving the debt issue. The vote was 50-49, or 10 short of the 60 votes needed to move forward on legislation proposed by Reid that would have carried out $2.2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years while raising the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion. The outcome of that vote did not directly affect the behind-the-scenes negotiations on a compromise. Immediately afterward, Reid told fellow senators that while they were “not there yet,” a vote on a possible compromise could still happen Sunday. “We are hopeful and confident it can be done.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, a key player in the negotiations, said as he headed back to his office that the sides were “really, really close.” Tuesday is the deadline for averting default, the day the Treasury says it will reach the limits of its borrowing authority to pay all the nation’s bills. McConnell, R-Ky., said earlier on the Sunday talk shows that negotiators were looking at a deal that would cut spending by some $3 trillion over the next decade while raising the debt ceiling through 2012 in a two-stage process. A Democratic official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks, said Vice President Joe Biden had been on the phone with McConnell multiple times over the preceding 24 hours. Biden has remained a key negotiator for the White House following the more public role he had earlier in leading several weeks of debt talks with lawmakers. Appearing on CNN and CBS, McConnell said he hoped to soon be able to present to his fellow Republicans an agreement “that they’ll consider supporting.” That agreement would include raising the debt ceiling, cutting spending by some $1 trillion initially and creating a joint committee of members of Congress that would look at a larger plate [...]
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